两栖动物皮肤中含有大量结构新颖和功能复杂多样的药理活性物质，是有待开发利用的资源宝库，国际研究的热点。尽管花姬蛙被用作中药有几百年，但是其疗效分子的本质却不为人们所知。通过cDNA文库大规模测序和生物信息学分析，我们最近从花姬蛙的皮肤中发现许多与功能已知多肽/蛋白密切相关的基因，其中28个基因编码的多肽的生物功能可能与花姬蛙的疗效密切相关。但是我们不确定这28个多肽的药理活性、高级结构和它们与花姬蛙中药疗效间的具体关系。本研究拟通过化学合成或重组表达来获得这28个多肽，通过药理活性的广泛筛选来确定它们的生物功能，通过圆二色谱、3-D核磁、晶体衍射、同源模拟和定点突变来确定它们的高级结构。本课题旨在研究花姬蛙皮肤28个潜在药用多肽的结构与功能，探讨花姬蛙作为中药的物质基础，期望找到具有药用前景的生物活性先导分子，并为花姬蛙的利用和保护提供思路和基础。

Amphibian skin contains a large number of pharmacologically bioactive substances with diverse structure and function, which is a pending development giant resource treasure house and being studied widely at present. Although there are a variety of therapeutic effects of Microhyla pulchra as a traditional Chinese medicine for several hundred years, its drug components are not known to the people. Recently, we constructed and sequenced the cDNA library of Microhyla pulchra skin and predicted the functions of the products encoded by those genes from the library. As a result, there are lots of genes whose products are highly homolog to peptides or proteins with reported pharmacological functions. Among them, the predicted pharmacological activities of the peptides encoded by 28 genes are closely associated with the therapeutic effects of Microhyla pulchra as a traditional Chinese medicine. However, we are not sure what the pharmacological activities of 28 peptides are exactly, what the structural basis of their pharmacological activities are and whether these peptides constitute the basis for therapeutic effects of Microhyla pulchra as a traditional medicine. In this study, 28 peptides will be obtained by chemical synthesis or recombinant expression, their functions will be determined by extensive pharmacological activities screening, as well as their spatial structures will be identified by circular dichroism spectra, 3-D nuclear magnetic resonance, crystal diffraction, homology modeling and site mutation. This project aims to study the structure and function of 28 potential pharmaceutical peptides from Microhyla pulchra skin, explore the molecular basis of Microhyla pulchra as a taditional Chinese medicines, find some novel lead molecules with promising medicinal prospect and provide the ideas and basics for the protection and utilization of Microhyla pulchra.